Month: May 2005

Throughout my adult life, I’ve been burned by artists. I enjoy a book, movie, or record, and find myself immensely disappointed by the follow-up works by the artist. Sometimes, it’s simply an instance where the first work is so singular, so arresting, that any subsequent work has to pale in comparison.

Other times, it becomes clear that the artist got lucky. He caught lightning in a bottle, and will never be that good again.

Years ago, the first time I phoned the critic and novelist David Gates, I asked him about the novel he was working on. He said, pretty facetiously, “I’m in a sort of bind. If it comes out like Jernigan [his first novel, which I adored], people will say I’m only capable of writing that type of book. If it comes out nothing like Jernigan, people who liked that book will complain that this one is no good.”

A few years later, when I read it, I thought, “This is pretty good, but it’s no Jernigan.” I was a little embarrassed about that reaction, but hey. I read the book again a few months ago, and enjoyed it a lot more than I remembered the first time.

But artists have burned me. I put a lot of stock in a strong artistic vision. After Miller’s Crossing, I was able to forgive the Coen Bros. a lot. Should I have? I kept going to their flicks, despite the recurring disappointments. Eventually, they produced a movie that I enjoyed immensely: The Man Who Wasn’t There. But they also made Intolerable Cruelty.

I haven’t seen a new Woody Allen movie in 7 or 8 years. Too many disappointments, and I was done. Can’t go back to the well too often.

Which gets us to I [Heart] Huckabees. The official VM fiancee and I disagreed about this flick beforehand. We were in agreement that, based on the commercials and trailer, it looked terrible. She dismissed it. I countered, “But it IS directed by the guy who made Three Kings . . .”

I had no intention of seeing Huckabees in the theater, but the DVD release reprised our mini-dispute over the movie. I promised her that, if I did watch it, I’d do so on a weeknight and not when she’s around on the weekends.

Then we found a used DVD sale this weekend, and together spent FAR too much money on movies (a combined $140, but we got 16 titles out of it, including the third season of Family Guy). Because of the “buy 3 get 1 free” part of the sale, I went back to the bins and picked up Huckabees at $12.

After I brought Amy home yesterday, I sat down and watched the movie.

Now, like I said, I was giving it a shot because of Three Kings. I adored that movie when I saw it in the theater with my buddy Jon-Eric. We watched it again the night before the Iraq War began. I watched it a third time during one of last year’s many trips. It should’ve been required viewing before the current war, but it probably would’ve confused both the pro- and anti-war sides.

Anyway, after a five-year gap, the director (David O. Russell) made Huckabees. I’m still trying to figure out why.

It purports to be an existential detective story, but the opposing worldviews it offers are pretty Lowest College Denominator (“Everything’s connected!” “No, everything’s meaningless!”), and the “plot” is centered so deliberately on coincidence that nothing gets around to meaning anything. The lessons we pick up, from what I gather, are that corporations are evil, evangelical Christians are evil, jet-skis are evil, and gasoline is evil. It’s also evil for women to have to look good, for people to buy cheap clothing, and for Lily Tomlin to wear tops with circular cut-outs to accentuate her breasts. I’m not making that up.

So, what I’m getting at is that I was yet again burned by thinking that David O. Russell had more than one good flick in him. It’s possible that his earlier movies were good, and maybe I’ll check them out. But, holy crap, was this one useless movie.

BONUS TIME!

For sticking through to the end of that post, you get the list of all the DVDs the official VM fiancee and I bought this weekend! Joy!

The Family Guy, Vol. 2

I [Heart] Huckabees

A Night at the Opera

The Ladies Man

Moulin Rouge

My Cousin Vinny

Bonnie and Clyde

Army of Darkness

Cannonball Run

The Ref

The Man With Two Brains

Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special

Enter the Dragon

Ghost Dog

Brazil

Animal Crackers

P.J. O’Rourke on the need to tax celebrity:

“America’s media and entertainment industry has a gross (as it were) revenue of $316.8 billion a year. If we subtract the income derived from worthy journalism and the publishing of serious books, that leaves $316.8 billion.”

Mickey Kaus links to a blogger who thinks he’s figured out how “red states” get red and “blue states” get blue.

Personally, I want to find out if Bloods vote Republican and Crips vote Democrat, but I guess no one’s explored that issue.

Keith Thompson writes about his departure from the cultural left wing:

I’ll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America’s political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today’s best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

And it’s in the San Francisco Chronicle, no less.

Virginia Postrel has a pretty good post about the Newsweek/Koran fiasco.

It puts me in mind of the furor over Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, back in 1988. A lot of Christians were pissed off when this one came out. People who’d never seen the movie called for protests, not realizing the humor factor in hearing Judas-by-way-of-Brooklyn, by Harvey Keitel.

Anyway, my point is, these Christians were irate about a movie portraying Jesus Christ as a man with some human feelings. You can argue about the validity of what they were mad about, but what’s incontrovertible is that no one started a riot over it. No one threatened the lives of Scorsese, Willem Dafoe, or Paul Schraeder (although some of my friends really disliked Bringing Out the Dead).

Or, as Ms. Postrel puts it:

With its Western biases, Newsweek thought it was writing about allegations of prisoner abuse, a human rights issue. Its overseas audience had a different reading. The differences between us and them really are bigger than the differences between us and us.

Chris Hitchens writes about George Galloway in the Weekly Standard:

We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of “charities,” he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal.

Read it all.

I don’t watch a ton of TV. Outside of sporting events (I’m an NBA geek, I admit), days can go by without my turning on the TV. For the most part, I’ve missed out on the reality TV craze, except for a couple of exceptions that stretch the definition. Penn & Teller’s series on Showtime, for example, seems like it should be called a documentary series, not reality TV.

That said, I’ve found myself utterly compelled to watch a new reality/documentary series on MTV: I Want a Famous Face.

Yup. Normal-ish people go around spending tens of thousands on plastic surgery so that they can resemble their favorite stars. Usually, the celebrities/targets in question are the trashy, heavily made-up types, like Carmen Electra or Tiffany Amber-Thiessen. But watching these people handing their surgeons covers of People magazine and saying, “Make me look like her,” is ridiculously fun to watch. (Okay: accent on the “ridicul” part of “ridiculously”.)

Fat woman who decides she looks enough like Jennifer Aniston to go the rest of the way via lipo, chin restructuring, boob implants? That’s entetainment!

Cute but boyish secretary who decides she wants to look like Britney Spears so that she can leave her day job as a secretary (at a plastic surgeon’s office) and get a job as a stripper? That’s even MORE entertainment!

Pudgy Latino guy who thinks he looks like Ricky Martin? Okay, maybe that’s NOT so entertaining, but still!

(Meanwhile, fer yer edification, let’s supplement the Awful Plastic Surgery link with this one, offering realistic advice from a cosmetic surgeon)

Joe Nash, an archivist of black dance history, died last month, a victim of his own archive:

Last Thanksgiving, he stumbled over a pile of materials in his packed apartment in a West Harlem housing project. As he fell, he clutched at a stack of books, which tumbled down on him, according to Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr, a friend who took care of him. Mr. Nash [. . .] lay on the floor for five days, until friends heard his cry for help [. . . .] “Every single room was storage–his bathroom, his bedroom,” Ms. AbuBakr said. “He just had enough space to lay down.”

Mr. Nash never recovered from the fall, friends said; he died on April 13 at 85 of cardiovascular problems. Now, because Mr. Nash had no heirs–and apparently left no will–the city has changed the locks on his apartment door and seized his property, in preparation for auctioning it off. Archivists, dance lovers and Mr. Nash’s friends are appalled by the possibility that the collection could be scattered to the winds.

Or maybe the city locked the stuff up to keep it from killing again.

Okay, it was a lame joke. But I was tired of trying to come up with a “dancing about architecture” line that would’ve pulled the story together. Sue me.